Quote of the Day: More Crime, More Guns? Edition

“This paper estimates the impact of climate change on the prevalence of criminal activity in the United States. The analysis is based on a 30-year panel of monthly crime and weather data for 2997 US counties. I identify the effect of weather on monthly crime by using a semi-parametric bin estimator and controlling for state-by-month and county-by-year fixed effects. The results show that temperature has a strong positive effect on criminal behavior, with little evidence of lagged impacts. Between 2010 and 2099, climate change will cause an additional 22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft in the United States.” – Matthew Ranson, Crime, weather, and climate change [via sciencedirect.com]

For murders, the only statistic I happen to know off the top of my hear, average about 16,000 total homicides annually in the USA. By this guy’s count, an “extra” 22,000 homicides over this 89 YEAR period is 180 EXTRA homicides a year “due to climate change”. That is a 1.1% increase in the average yearly rate over the entire period? ONE PERCENT!

If you look back over crimes rates you will find a correlation between crime and economic activity where crime goes up a bit when the economy is slow and decreased where things are better. Same for the suicide rate, btw. I may be wrong but I would bet a box a .22LR that in some years the economic impact on the homicide rate has been 1%.

When the weather gets hot, the hooligans get restless. Everybody who’s survived a St. Louis summer knows that. The secret to reducing street crime : issue every hooligan an air conditioner, so they can stay in and watch television instead of roaming the streets all sweaty and itchy and pissed-off.

While I think his overall thesis equating “climate change” to more crime dubious I do think there is some utility to what he may have found in the historical part of his analysis. If we can use his information to show that, for instance, it was the higher or lower temperatures in Chicago that drove the increase or decrease in crime rather than any of their disarmament measures that was responsible for the changes in the crime level this is great for us. It finally gives us a data set to point out that criminals are just as averse to working in sub-zero temperatures as the rest of the world.

Universal Preschool has nothing to do with improving education. The effects of pre-school program improvements measured in first and second grade disappear by fourth grade.

The point of UP is to provide taxpayer-funded daycare for the urban poor. It incidentally puts all public school students under the government’s tutelage from a very early age. How convenient from an indoctrination point of view. I’d better go check to see if the pre-school programs are run by conservatives! Laugh. Sure.

Less people leave the house in $*****y weather if they don’t have to. Less people to rob, less people to get robbed. Its like saying snow damage on houses goes down during the summer. In that case wouldn’t global warming reduce home repair costs?

I find the Progressives v. Conservatives name calling (in either direction) silly. All it tells me is that the people indulging really really want an identity.

What matters are issues. Parties only matter because the U.S. devolved into a spoils system well over one-hundred years ago.

Ben Franklin was right, that the creation of ‘factions,’ (parties), would be the doom of democracy. The folks that play the game with real money control the parties and just hide themselves behind the curtain, pulling the Oz-like levers. I’ve known people with vast wealth who publicly are Dems only to influence spending and taxes in a Dem state. Republicans? Similar examples.

It’s like the caliber wars. Why talk about calibers when what we should be passing around is careful reports of manufacturing quality in recent examples of guns, or interesting cases in gun law, or, well, anything but caliber wars.

If you do not designate the enemy you lose. The same as the “blame game” meme. To fix a problem you first have to affix the blame on those who caused it, remove them from the issue, and never, not f**king ever allow them to have any interaction with the system they f**ked up. You can’t fix something if the person who broke it continues to break it every time you turn your back.

“Belief in the moon’s influence is an ancient one, and common in many cultures including our own. If police and doctors are expecting that full moon nights will be more hectic, they may interpret an ordinary night’s traumas and crises as more extreme than usual. Our expectations influence our perceptions, and we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. (The same thing happens on “bad days” when everything seems to go wrong, but only a few key things actually do.)

Yet carefully controlled studies have not found good evidence supporting this idea. ”

But aside from that, without access to the full text of the article, I can’t tell if Mr. Ivory Tower here is making his claim based on *percentage* increase, or just gross numbers. This matters because as population size increases, gross numbers of actions will always increase. RATE PER CAPITA matters far more to indicate whether a society is encountering less or more crime overall.

This is kind of disappointing in its own way. Normally enviro-nazi agenda pushers are more subtle and clever with their BS.

Notice how he carefully and ditifully uses the term “climate change”, which is not falsifiable, because the climate is always changing, then assumes that “climate change” means “global warming”.

Here we sit, with 15 years of flat line global temperatures, neither any real warming or cooling for 15 years, completely contrary to the models that the “global warming” thesis is built on, and he still assumes that we can predict what is going to happen over then next 80 years.

Ummm….. no.
The average global surface temperature (fluctuates a lot from year to year, because that’s what the weather does) has increased by approximately 0.1C in the last 15 years. Approximately 1C in the last 130 years.

Not to mention most of the heat has been going into the ocean and the icecaps (which ARE shrinking, I don’t think anybody can disprove that). Which in turn is (probably) causing the weird weather the last couple of years.

A) We can’t do anything to stop it.
B) It’s so slow a change that it has less effect on real living circumstances than *day to day weather*.

And

C) Even if we *could* stop it, it would just screw up something else, like every time the park service re-introduces a species somewhere and it ends up wiping out something else.

Things, including the climate, change. This IS the natural state. Only humans can possibly be so arrogant as to think that they are separate from nature, and that the effect of our industry and technological development isn’t natural.

Bullsh*t. Temperature varies more than 1C in any given set of 5 years, so, bullsh*t. This cry to shutdown all human industry and agriculture is bullsh*t. And as for this jacka$$ and his crime stats, bullsh*t. Violent crime, as several people in this thread point out, has been falling for a couple of decades, according to “statistics”. Leftards don’t get to have it both ways. They are liars. Period. Full stop.

” This type of statistical analysis is meant specifically to avoid the correlation is not causation problem. ”

Except that that is entirely impossible because perfectly controlled environments do not exist and perfectly unbiased analysis is not humanly possible.

The best we can hope for is “close enough to causation that theory becomes universally accepted. And this shit is nowhere near that.

“And if you don’t think people go crazy in the heat and stay indoors in the cold, visit some interesting neighborhoods of DC in February and then June.”

And yet, the vast majority of the human race manages to make it through these seasons annually without perpetrating crime.

Claiming weather or climate changes cause crime is laughable. Claiming criminals are more active in good weather, just like the rest of the human race, is hardly valuable contribution to the literature.

Hmmm. Remember that Man-made global warming is another scam to increase government control of individuals. It’s not science, it’s politics. This theory goes hand-in-hand with “gun control.”
But just in case, always remember to put on your SPF 15 along with your gun.

There weren’t droughts this severe in my homeland before, now it is so dry during the summer that you can hear plants sucking up water (no exaggeration). I am not the only one saying this, ask any farmer.

I do admit that environmentalists are annoying and won’t admit that temperature fluctuations are natural. The problem is that these natural fluctuations don’t happen this fast, humans have affected the temperature.

No, we don’t. Just b/c weather changes within memory of one or two generations does not mean humans are behind it. The earth has been gradually, normally warming since the “Little Ice Age” from the 1100’s to the late 1700’s. Although the highest temperatures of the century were recorded in the 1930’s in North America, the coldest winters in a century in Europe were 1941-42 and 44-45. Climate changes naturally and gradually, not b/c of anything we do.
Second, proof of the fraud is that Univ. of East Anglia’s(UK) 15,000 emails showed a conspiracy to make up numbers and results, slander scientists who disagreed, and collude with the Univ. of PA to “Peer review” each others’ “scientific studies.” East Anglia Univ. was the official UN source of all their global warming propaganda until the hacked emails revealed their fraud.
Third, the co-founder of Greenpeace left it in early 90’s b/c he said it was flooded by communists who, knowing communism was discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union, looked to evironmentalism as a way to convince people that government was the answer to all their problems. They’re called by some “Killer Watermelons”: green on the outside, red on the inside.
Just as “gun control” is not about guns, but control; so man-made “global warming” is not about climate, but about controlling people and engineering vast transfer payments from first-world countries to third-world countries.

I said my homeland, which is not Norway but Bosnia. Norway still requires a diving suit to survive for most of the year.

I do know about the fact that it is natural but people are influencing it too. IMO global warming isn’t the main problem, it’s the pollution and reckless deforestation. It is getting blown out of proportion and taking attention away from more serious issues, and to introduce more bureocracy.

It is also ridiculous to say that CO2 is the worst. The chemical that affects the climate the most is H2O (aka water), and it is a good thing since otherwise we would be screwed (would be too cold).

I think the more important question about global warming or climate change is not “are we causing it?” but is more “what could we do to mitigate it, at this point?”

The answer is: Not much, really.

The only thing that could hope to put a kabash on what has happened or what we’ve done is a massive financial collapse and corresponding failure of modern civilization. Worldwide. Not that these things are entirely out of the question given our current state.

“I think the more important question about global warming or climate change is not “are we causing it” but is more “what actually could we do to mitigate it, at this point?” ”

I see what you tried to pull there. “More important than asking, “Is it real,” is asking, “Since I’ve completely blown off question one and am now assuming the answer was “yes,” (never mind that it’s not), the question is …”

The real question is, since the climate has been changing since Earth has had an atmosphere, what kind of mentality does it take to actually believe that human activity had has any impact on it at all, let alone life-threatening doomsday scenarios?

“The problem is that these natural fluctuations don’t happen this fast, humans have affected the temperature.”

This kind of talk drives me insane.

Please, do tell: What part of humanity is unnatural?

It’s always a stunning display of arrogance to me that our species tries to separate itself from nature. People in that frame of thought need to get over themselves. We are *just another part of nature*. As is the plastic we’ve created.

If our actions render our habitat unsurvivable, well, that’s just a failed evolutionary experiment, and nothing more. Stop thinking the human race is such a special snowflake.

“Short of modern civilization collapsing” And there it is, sorta. Leftards want it collapsed for EVERYONE ELSE. They want to keep modern, high energy technology for just a small group, themselves, and drive the rest of the population into a pre-Industrial “utopia”.

Climate changes constantly. This religious fervor over global warming, which you now try to hide by switching to “climate change” is not science. Humans are not destroying the environment. Climatic variables are just that, variable. Humans are not causing any of it. As for sea level rising? Hahahahahahahahahahah. Tidal erosion is the problem, sea level, just like temperature, VARIES, and the biggest variable in sea levels at any given time is the Moon. Orbital mechanics and Solar output are the causes of variations in climate and sea level. You planning to turn down the Sun and stop everything from moving?

He sure had a fancy way of saying I’m making some wild a$$ guesses to support my personal view and try to get someone to throw some money at me so I can keep making wild a$$ guesses rather than getting a real job.

It’s the typical liberal/progressive mantra: People can’t be held accountable for their actions. There is always an external force to blame, whether it be inanimate objects like guns or, in this case, the weather. In their minds, the only people that should ever be held accountable for anything are the people that they disagree with. For example, criminal breaks into home and is shot by homeowner. Criminal is just a poor guy down on his luck and didn’t need to die. Homeowner is an evil selfish scumbag that should have been generous and let the criminal help himself to some property so he can feed his drug addiction. See, it’s not his fault. He is addicted to drugs and the government needs to spend more money on drug awareness and rehab to help these guys. But, the homeowner, destroy him!!!!

The alarmists never mention that ‘global warming’, aka increased atmospheric CO2 causes plants to grow faster and produce more food. With increased agricultural production the planet will be able to support more people and unless there is a decrease in the homicide rate, then yes, there will be more people and therefor more homicides. Oh, the horror – more people!

It seems like my fellow commenters are really looking for flaws here. I’m not sure what they are all complaining about.

People have known that weather affects crime for a long time. And I’m pretty sure there is a good science showing that the global average temperatures are rising over time. I’m not gonna discuss why that is, but neither did the paper’s abstract, so I don’t think its relevant here. So this guy, whose job it is to come up with interesting ideas for academic papers, wrote a paper linking the two. I thought it was interesting. I’m not seeing some nefarious political agenda here. Let’s not pick nits around here. There are plenty of verifiably stupid political issues facing us. This isn’t one of them.

If you actually read the whole article, you would see for instance that he cites numerous hypotheses about why weather affects crime rates, and not all of them have to do with people not having a choice in their behavior. For instance, he notes that on a warm pleasant evening there are more people walking the streets and therefore more opportunities for muggings, etc.

The truth about guns is an important medium for making cogent, truthful arguments about the facts about guns. When people just attack anything that smells like a “liberal” issue, I think it weakens the credibility of this great site. So, don’t be that guy.

Global warming is going to mean a lot of things. Some good, some bad. There’s no need to pretend it isn’t happening, and there’s no need to pretend that everything about global warming will be a negative. I’m sure there are people in Maine who would love some global warming.

I’m not so much of a ‘climate denier’, there’s at least a grain of truth to most of what they’re saying, it’s what they’re not saying that I have issue with. Like the fact that more CO2 in the air will make plants grow faster and produce more food, or the fact that a half a million years ago Greenland was covered by a forest and now it’s a frozen wasteland. They love to throw out all sorts of horror stories based on demonstrably faulty computer programs, but the vast majority of the effects of more CO2 are totally positive. Bottom line is the earth will sustain more life, plant animal and human with 1000ppm CO2 than with 260ppm. Find a global warming alarmist who even knows that we are still living in the Pleistocene Ice Age. They love to claim that we’re anti-science when they’re completely ignorant about it.

It’s not so much life, as much as bio-diversity. We don’t know how exactly some of the more fragile ecosystems would respond. Climate change causes extinction of some species , though usually it takes place on a time scale about a hundred times longer. There’s a difference between a natural extinction and a man-caused extinction. We also don’t understand biospheres completely, so there’s a chance some natural biospheres would just catastrophically collapse.

But there are much worse things people are doing to the environment than global warming (LA smog from a couple years back, China now).

Mr. California, I do care about the welfare of the little critters less intelligent than ourselves. But you should consider what we know about the climate before human civilization came about. Fifteen thousand years ago half of America was covered in a glacier 5000′ deep and sea level was 390′ lower than today. The climate stability of the last 5000 years is not the norm but the exception. The climate often changed by as much as 10C in just a couple of decades. The last ice age is in fact the current ice age. The glaciers advance for 100,000 years or so and then retreat for usually a much shorter period, 20 or 30 thousand years. In the last 4 interglacial periods the global temperatures peaked at 6-10C higher than today. Most of Greenland melted in the last one, and while Greenland is losing 50 cubic miles of ice a year, the Greenland ice sheet is 680,000 cubic miles (do the math on that one). The long term changes have been that the earth has been getting colder for millions of years while CO2 has been diminishing. About 15 million years ago Antarctica began to freeze. 3 million years ago plant life disappeared and the Arctic Ocean began to be permanently frozen. Thus began the Pleistocene Ice Age. The glaciers are coming back, but we have already delayed them. If we continue on our current path for a few more centuries they may not come back at all and the Holocene will become a whole new epoch and not just a brief footnote in the Pleistocene.

Contrast that with the last century and a half when CO2 rose from 260ppm to almost 400ppm today (still a fraction of CO2 levels a few million years ago). Temperatures have risen about 0.8C which is less than the difference between Milwaukee and Chicago. This winter temperatures in my neck of the woods were 7F below normal in December and January, 13F below in February and 8F below so far in March. If a plant or animal can cope with a winter that far below the norm, they surely can cope with changes that are a tenth of that.

Bottom line is that the only thing behind anthropogenic global warming is a few computer models that completely missed the screeching halt in the warming that has occurred over the last 17 years. It is highly possible that in 2100 the global temps will be a degree (probably Fahrenheit) higher than today, but that would be a good thing not a bad thing. Cold is the enemy of life, not warmth. As the planet gets warmer the tropics expand and the rest of the climate zones move up to higher latitudes (or elevation). It won’t get much warmer in Panama, it will get much warmer in Fairbanks, AK, and most of that will come in the winter. I’d guess even the polar bears will welcome that change.

The fact that people here attack him and his fairly banal conclusion (that any inner-city cop could have revealed) because he mentions climate change speaks more to their fervent need to exist in a bubble than his methodology, which is common to pretty much any statistical analysis.

Well, I for one, am “complaining” because “global warming” or “climate change” or whatever they’re calling the population bomb this year was debunked in the 1970’s, but the Church of Warmingism is still flogging it as the end of civilization as we know it unless “we” DO SOMETHING, which usually means raise taxes more and make more natural behaviors illegal.

Then he presents this well-documented bullshit as if it’s real and that taxing the country into slavery will somehow fix the weather.

How many guns will it cause to “go off” I wonder? I’m proud of my local fishwrap. They recently recounted the story of a tragic and fatal negligent discharge and said the gun “went off,” but in the next sentence said she “would have had to pull the trigger.”

Don’t care to start a debate on global warming, but I have found global warming a useful tool for debating gun control with my more liberal friends. All I do is equate most gun control advocates with the dreaded “science-deniers” who refuse to believe in global warming. Sometimes, I’ll also compare their “common sense” views on gun control with those who say global warming doesn’t exist after experiencing a single cold winter. Calling into doubt their scientific bona fides sometimes opens them up to reading scholarly studies on gun control and the critiques of the b.s. gun control studies that the press touts so often, e.g. Dr. Kellerman’s junk science.

I like that angle. It is true, isn’t it, that the best in is to identify with the liberal pretense to scientific savvy (though they all seem to be social workers, journalism majors, and sales people), then point out the scientific (well, statistical) basis of the “more guns, less crime” facts. Sophisticated. I should be more flexible in my strategies.

No one I talk with about climate change or global warming knows anything about it. They simply pieced together a narrative from Rolling Stone and the NYT. It’s so strange. They believe. It’s like god. They heard there is a god. “Must be the season of the witch.”

First, the Federal Reserve is blaming weather for slow economic recovery (btw there’s no recovery, not yet anyway, but it’s not due to weather). Now this guy says warmer temperatures = more gun crime? How about a cold climate? Is there less violent crime when temperatures drop? It was pretty cold, freezing even here in NJ the past few months. I don’t remember violent crime going away or slowing down. I think Matthew should find a new dissertation topic.

I think you should read the full article. It’s kind of obvious that you didn’t. He talks about differences in cold climate and also says that weather has a strong effect on short time crime, but over the long term not as much. I don’t think the author of the article is making as overbroad of a case as you are attacking him for.

The link takes me to a purchase page, so no, I didn’t read the whole thing. He says he only checked US counties, but what about comparing that to other countries? Russia has constant cold climates, yet the murder rate is higher there. Shouldn’t it be low if his research is right? Shouldn’t all crime rates there be lower? Norway and Finland can be pretty cold, but gun ownership there is relatively high, yet not that much violent crime.

Even if you can’t access the full version (which you can for free in the above link), why would you critique an article that you haven’t read?

I think if there was a good study showing that gun ownership decreased crime, we would be annoyed at people who critiqued it without having even read it. Why should we hold ourselves to a lower standard?

So how does he define a short term effect on crime? A few hours? Overnight? Weekend? Does it matter? If as you’ve said overall long-term crime rate is not affected, what’s the point of this research? And why is Matthew predicting such large increases in crime due to global warming if temperatures only have a short term effect on crime?

If low temperatures reduce short term crime, wouldn’t high temperatures increase it? But if the overall long term crime rate is not affected, does it matter? Both would be either insignificant or would essentially cancel each other out over a long term, no? And yet he comes to a conclusion that crime rate will end up higher due to weather. I don’t see how he could deduce that from those premises.

What is it about his facts that you find lacking? I really am not getting what you guys are finding no offense about this.

We accuse gun control advocates of making up their own facts, and we try to refute that with “the truth about guns”. So, what are the facts here that you all find so problematic? Are you arguing against them because you don’t like the conclusion, or do you have some scientifically reliable basis?

I don’t think it’s right to disagree with studies just because you don’t like the political ramifications. That’s why I disagree with what gun control advocates are doing. I don’t think its ok to just do the same thing they are doing in re: to climate change. This article isn’t even about WHY climate change occurs, is just run regressive analysis from statistics derived from what I think are reliable sources of facts.

The research is for entertainment purposes (and a pay check): If the global warming predictions are true, then it is possible that his findings will pan out.

The problem of crime has nothing to do with temperature, except on a local-pattern level. There are warm places with low crime and cold places with very high crime. In places that are often very warm, crime will fall when the weather is very cold. In places that are cool all summer (ah, Sweden) crime does not vary much as the cold weather comes along. Theft probably increases in the winter in Scandinavia because darkness prevails most of the 24-hour day.

I don’t fault the guy for running some numbers, but if I find out my taxes paid for the work I’ll be seriously irritated. Again.

In the 1970’s, the chicken littles, er, I mean, experts, warned of the global cooling and the coming ice age. Didn’t happen. In the 1980’s, they switched gears and harped on global warming. Also didn’t happen, not to any discernible and impactful degree, anyway. There are ups and downs, but they can’t pin them down and can’t pin them on CO2 levels. So now they go around whining about amorphous “climate change”, so they can take credit and cash a grant check no matter what happens. Nice scam.

There are about half a dozen major mathematical models in service to predict climate activity. Not only have they all failed to predict future temperature, for failing to account for confounding variables like cloud coverage, heat reflection, and the Pacific vent, but these silly models have failed to predict past climate activity. That’s right: when applied to the known historical data set (which itself is suspect, but I digress), they can’t even come up with the right numbers historically. How can you credibly predict the future when you cannot even reliably pattern the past?

So here comes Mister Matt Ranson, hard working, high thinking, smart young chap, with his freshly minted Harvard Ph.D. in Public Policy (professional pusher arounder, aka, nanny stater), to tell us what’s what. He’s taking long discredited ideas about global warming, and using them as the basis for a laughably unproveable claim about crime a century or so hence.

I long for the good old days when our top universities graduated people who could really do something, like split the atom, land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth, or cure/prevent major diseases. Even New Coke and the hot side hot, cold side cold, styrofoam box contraption of 1980’s McDLT sandwhiches are looking pretty impressive compared to what passes for research today.

Yes, extreme heat may make people lethargic. Hell, it may make people dead. It’s called an outlier. Most causation graphs will be a bell-curve of returns. Going from 30F-50F will increase crime some, 50F-70F more, 70F-90F will start to give diminishing returns. Doesn’t mean that the basic idea is wrong.

Hannibal, I’m charmed to find you statistically astute. But you have to agree, the report is yesterday’s papers. In fact it’s any year’s Chicago Tribune editions tell the story more graphically, with local color.

But let me point out: According to the CDC there were 16,259 homicides in 2010. If the population grows at 1% and the homicide rate stays the same, in 2099 there would be 39,500 homicides, 23,000 more than 2010.

So let’s see, 22,000 more with climate change, 23,000 without. You be the judge. I probably would have concluded more people cause more murders, and I didn’t even need a fancy semi-parametric bin estimator.

This is probably one of those times he needed to do a study and so he decided to take a well-understood phenomenon of heat and crime (despite what people here want to believe) and extrapolate it into the future. Not very earth-shattering.

Matthew Ranson
Environment and Resources Division, Abt Associates Inc., 55 Wheeler Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States
This paper was written with support from a Harvard University Dissertation completion Fellowship and from Abt Associates. Lisa Tarquinio and Lauren Parker provided capable research assistance. I am grateful for helpful comments from Eduardo Montoya, Erich Muehlegger, Robert Stavins, Martin Weitzman, Richard Zeckhauser, and seminar participants at Harvard University and Abt Associates. The ideas presented in this paper do not reflect the views of Abt Associates. Any errors are my own.

There is a strong statistical significance for crime and temperature, but it is a very limited band. Go from 70 to 80, Solid increase. Go from 110 to 120, no increase, everyone is laying in the shade or under an air conditioner. If global warming were real, the crime increase we could expect would be small overall. It’s not an unlimited effect.

That is so laughably stupid. It goes beyond the fallacy of treating correlation as causation. It reaches new, uber levels of stupidity.

The ultimate cause of such acts as murder and rape are the evil wills of the perpetrators. Colder weather often means less crime, true, in that even evil people tend to be less active and stay at home. But warm weather does not cause crime, just as cold weather does not make people virtuous. It merely is a factor that influences what choices people with free will make.

Crime correlates with many things. E.g., economic fatherhood (that is the rate of fatherhood where fathers are actively involved in raising children) inversely correlates with violent crime. The more 18-45 year olds on the street without familial responsibility, the more crime. Much of the drop in the 1990’s onwards has been due to locking up more people for longer, which has a similar effect of cold weather, less opportunity for crime. But even though crimes rates vary inversely with this economic fatherhood (and very closely too), even that is not causation. Having a child does not turn one away from evil, and being childless does not make someone evil. Rather we have to look for a rational connection. Here I would suggest that the sort of men who would father and take responsibility for a family are generally better than those who reject responsibility (absent fathers e.g.). So all that information tells us is that a sense of responsibility and duty to others is contrary to criminal inclinations and should be fostered

Likewise, all the “cold weather equals less crime” correlation tells us is that if fewer people are out and about, fewer will be targets of crime. There is nothing useful in that, since, short of curfews, mandatory escort laws, etc there is nothing there to use to combat violence. Rather, it is merely a sign that violence is an issue, that when more people are out and about they are prey to evil people. We should be able to be active and not be prey.

He forgot to mention that the sky was going to fall by the, cats and dogs would be living together and the ice caps were going to disappear. He also failed to mention that the minorities that are committing the lions share of the crime in this country would be the majority ethnic groups by then so naturally their criminal behavior would increase proportionally.

The biggest problem here is the assertion that Climate Change will *cause* murders, rapes, and violence. It may enable more violence, but it doesn’t cause it. It’s like saying that humans have no free will, if you raise the temperature a bit, they lose any sense of reason and start killing each other.

I don’t think anyone is saying there is no free will. By using MudPuppy’s line of reasoning, you can’t say that gun ownership causes a reduction in crime because it would assume there is no free will. It’s a bad argument. When the writer of the paper says “causes” he is saying that there is a cause and effect relationship, rather than mere correlation. It creates conditions where crime is more likely to happen.

It really feels like you guys just don’t understand the whole point of academic research. This PhD student is not curing cancer, and he’s not claiming to predict what the crime rate in 90 years will be, he is trying to measure a single factor in a complex system. It’s imprecise, but it’s useful in the long term.

Nor has the writer proposed any new laws or regulations. All of this railing against “liberal” causes makes this group sound just as knee-jerk reactionary as the other side.

Don’t be so easily manipulated. There are powers that stand to gain from increased regulation, and there are powers that stand to gain from denying climate change. Let’s not pretend that one will resort to manipulation of facts but the other side won’t. You need to figure this shit out for yourself and trust no one.